Hegemony : Brian Meeks

I have been thinking about hegemony in the Caribbean for more than two decades, utilizing the Gramscian notion that social formations are structured in dominance, but that domination is often not primarily executed through force; rather, the social bloc in charge is able to produce and reproduce discourses and sets of ideas that give structure and shape to its apparent . . .

Impunity : Zahid R. Chaudhary

On January 23, 2016 Trump declaimed at a rally in Sioux Center, Iowa: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” The statement—perhaps exaggerated and perhaps not—is outside the bounds of true and false because it is a performative, enacting, among other things, a masculinist will to power, one that anticipates . . .

Better : Jacques Lezra

“Better” words—that’s a claim we could understand; perhaps today we could generally endorse the idea that it’s better to have better words to hand than less-good ones (though we’d be hard-pressed to correlate an education, even or especially at an Ivy League school, with the “knowledge” or “having” of such better words). Some words are “better” than others . . .

Disruption : Ben Parker

In the year after Donald Trump was elected, the opinion pages of The New York Times were consistent in diagnosing the threat a Trump presidency bore to the republic, in essays titled “Democracy, Disrupted,” “Declaration of Disruption,” “The President’s Self-Destructive Disruption,” and “The Dangers of Disruption.” What did the various . . .

Reading : John Cayley

The President does not read. This statement, my own, is derived from two articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times that were published before and after the 2016 election, respectively. I might have quoted something like it, out of context, from the title of the Washington Post article, but Trump was not yet president and I would have been pointedly . . .

Trump : Joan Wallach Scott

Is “trump” a political concept in the sense that Adi Ophir has defined it?—as a “unit of mental representation,” a linguistic performance that “tries to explain, to present and to express the essence of what the concept refers to.” Is it, pace Koselleck, more than a word? He writes, “In use a word can be unambiguous. By contrast, a concept must remain ambiguous in order . . .